Wednesday, November 24, 2010

On Korea, Here We Go Again!

By Robert ParryNovember 24, 2010

If American journalism should have learned one thing over the years, it is to be cautious and skeptical during the first days of a foreign confrontation like the one now playing out on the Korean Peninsula. Often the initial accounts from the “U.S. side” don’t turn out to be entirely accurate.

12 comments:

Adam G
said...

It appears that the South Korean military exercise (firing of artillary) was in waters near the border (not in N Korean territory). That still is not an "attack" on N Korea. This was in many sources. N Korea was also warned of the exercises in advance. You forgot to mention that in your article. That was also reported by many sources. So your assumed shortcoming of media reporting is a little short-sighted.

Thanks Robert. Adam is nit-picking.The invasion of Iraq, following the hideous years of sanctions, was never in the least justified. Millions of people protested before the attack; any thinking person knew there were no WMD and certainly no danger to the USA or UK or Australia from a broken, ruined country of a dictator supported by "the West" for decades. Not even medicines for children, or shrouds for the dead, were allowed in by the kind US and UK during the 1990s.

IF Stone wrote The Hidden History of the Korean War, which documents the financial interests of Wall Street in soybean futures even back then when the burning question became Who Lost China? Stone's book translated into Spanish in Mexico was rounded up and burned by the U.S. Embassy. Start there for the competing narrative, as well as the fact that Japan and Korea were both fire-bombed by the U.S. which has kept Japan in a "peace and security pact" bondage and threatened Korea with nuclear annihilation. The joint US-ROK exercises have ratcheted up the "message" to DPRK and PRC taking place in the East Sea/Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea between China and Korea, so this is the third attempt to provoke a false flag war in the last 6 months.

"The Post makes no reference to the possibility that North Korea simply overreacted to what it saw as an attack from the South."

If NK hadn't been attacking SK for 50 years, this might be plausible. But NK has done everything from digging tunnels to sending submarines to assassination attempts. It is ridiculous to say that SK would ever attack NK. SK is killing NK economically, and doesn't have the manpower to win a war. NK knows this. To pretend that SK would ever attack NK is to buy into the paranoia of a horrid dictator. It is simply not in SK's interest.

How many times does NK have to be caught doing these things before they're considered an unreliable source for info?

It is not in the interest of CM to report with objectivity. The industrial military complex needs a war and the CM is providing the biased facts. After all, Dan Broder's advocating war as good for the economy.

I usually agree with Robert Parry but this time I'm a little skeptical of his own analysis. Although it is true that the brain-dead mainstream media parrots the Washington line and seems to mindlessly support our endless wars, North Korea is hardly an innocent wallflower even under the best of circumstances. If it turns out that South Korea did indeed fire onto N.K.'s soil then N.K.'s shelling of the inhabited island *might* be understandable. If the South fired on N.K.'s territorial waters, there would be significantly less justification for any "retaliation" by the North. If the response was only to U.S.-S.K. war games in open waters, then the North's bombardment of the island-village is totally unjustifiable. At least so far, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the South fired ON the North. Blowing up a village on a populated island and killing & wounding innocent people cannot be rationalized away, no matter how uncritical the American media has become. But let's hope that no matter what transpires or what the facts are, cooler heads prevail. The South presumably would win a war against the North, but the cost would be catastrophic to everyone concerned.

"Meanwhile, Washington refuses to acknowledge that its ally, Israel, is a full-blown rogue nuclear state with a sophisticated and undeclared nuclear arsenal of its own."What utter tosh. Israel is surrounded on all sides by hostile neighbours who have constantly attempted to, or supported attempts to, eradicate it since day one. R Parry is attempting to re-ignite old cold war divides with, inevitably, the USA being painted as the evil aggressor. It is beyond comprehension that he attempts to portray the totatlitarian stalinists in North Korea as the 'victim' of American imperialism. What a joke.It is this kind of pinko-leftist cry wolf rubbish that keeps radical analysis in the ghetto. The deep strings of capital go on behind the scenes - the commodity maintains its rule unchallenged. America seeks to keep it running as smoothly as possible, with all the dire consequences that involves. But North Korea have a different, far more dangerous outlook: with a medieval style economic system, war is one way the rulers can hope to maintain their grip on power.

"Meanwhile, Washington refuses to acknowledge that its ally, Israel, is a full-blown rogue nuclear state with a sophisticated and undeclared nuclear arsenal of its own."What utter tosh. Israel is surrounded on all sides by hostile neighbours who have constantly attempted to, or supported attempts to, eradicate it since day one. R Parry is attempting to re-ignite old cold war divides with, inevitably, the USA being painted as the evil aggressor. It is beyond comprehension that he attempts to portray the totatlitarian stalinists in North Korea as the 'victim' of American imperialism. What a joke.

Adam G. said: "This was in many sources". How many newspapers do I have to read every morning to get the FULL story? and if the narrative is complex and contradictory, why can't the no.1 newspaper in the country, the NYTimes, admit that the picture is complex ?????